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It’s not easy being a woman these days, particularly under certain regimes that seem bound and determined to suppress women’s rights.

In February 2011, 30-year-old mother of four and housewife Miriam Isaura López Vargas was returning home after dropping her kids off at school in Ensenada, Mexico. Plainclothes soldiers seized her, blindfolded her, and took her to a military barracks, where they tortured her with electric shocks to the soles of her feet. They covered her nose with a wet cloth and shot a stream of water up her nose while pressing down on her stomach. Then they raped her, over and over again.

Eventually, exhausted and traumatized, Miriam signed a false confession claiming that she was involved in drug trafficking.

When it seemed no one else would or could help Miriam, the human rights group Amnesty International made her story public and fought for her freedom. In September 2011, a judge ordered her released due to lack of evidence. With Amnesty International’s assistance, Miriam has since lodged a legal complaint against the individuals responsible for her ordeal.

Miriam is just one of countless women and girls for whom Amnesty International has provided a lifeline.

Informally founded in 1961 when British lawyer Peter Benenson protested the imprisonment of two Portuguese students, Amnesty International has utilized such methods as letter-writing campaigns, legal support, criminal investigations and orchestrated lobbying and publicizing campaigns in order to achieve the release of “prisoners of conscience.”

Farmers are on their way to tend their crops when a missile slams into their midst, thrusting shrapnel in all directions.

A CIA drone, flying so high that the farmers can’t see it, has killed most of them. None of them were militants.

Such attacks by U.S. drones are common, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights said Friday in a statement on strikes in Pakistan’s tribal region of North Waziristan.

The rapporteur, Ben Emmerson, told CNN the actions are of dubious international legality, despite the United States’ assertions.

“I’m not aware of any state in the world that currently shares the United States’ expansive legal perspective that it is engaged in a global war — that is to say a non-international armed conflict with al Qaeda and any group associated with al Qaeda, wherever they are to be found, that would therefore lawfully entitle the United States to take action involving targeted killing wherever an individual is found,” Emmerson said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other U.S. groups are questioning the legitimacy of the President Obama-approved drone program, and they’re looking for evidence for a legal battle.

On Friday, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled the CIA must acknowledge the existence of any records related to military unmanned drone strikes targeting individuals, such as overseas terror suspects.

The ACLU and others had filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but the CIA refused to confirm or deny it had any such records, citing national security.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it in the last four weeks, I said a year ago birth pains. Condoleezza Rice said, I believe on this program, we are seeing birth pains in the Middle East and I said at that time, that word is, A, biblical in nature. It has a lot of stuff on prophecy involved with it. But beyond that. It implies we’re giving birth — there’s an event at the end and it also implies that things happen and start to happen more and more rapidly and they get stronger. in the last four weeks how much some of the stuff that was just theory,about a year ago, two years ago, three years ago is now starting to unfold and come out and it’s all, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one right after another?

I never would have believed that President Bush would get behind the Law of the Sea Treaty. I never would have believed in a million years that President Bush would circumvent U.S. sovereignty by taking Texas to court in this, you know, Jose Medellin case, this vicious brutal rapist and killer that he’s fighting the State of Texas in international courts over it.

it’s a lose-lose situation. If the President loses, then — I mean, it’s a lose-lose situation if you’re a federalist. Then what it means is you’ve got a weak federal government. You’ve got a government probably more in line with what the founding fathers wanted that Texas and all of the states have a right to say no to the federal government. You go ahead and sign that little global warming treaty; not for us.

I know it should be, but that’s not — if you are somebody who believes in a strong federal government, that is — and he does, that’s why he’s fighting it as well. If he loses, the federal government loses a lot of its power in an unbelievable framework. If he wins, the Constitution loses because now courts, out-of-country courts are above our Supreme Court.

let’s talk about the Law of the Sea Treaty, which is so frightening, it makes the Medellin case look like, you know, nursery school.

This is — and fill in any places here, Pat, where I’ve got it wrong. This passed yesterday in committee in the Senate and it’s going to the full Senate for a vote, and Bush will sign it. Unless Americans stand up and call their senators right now, this thing is going to go — this is going to pass.

It will become law. It will become part of the Constitution.

Constitution. It’s not part of the law. It’s Constitution.

If they sign this thing and ratify it. And what it is is it gives power to the UN to control outline mineral rights, all oceans, all air above the oceans. It creates something called the Enterprise that if — let’s say Exxon says I want to go drill for — well, what’s happening now? China is going to drill in between Florida and Cuba. So let’s say we said we wanted to — I know it’s crazy. We would never do this. We want to actually go look for oil under the water and we would have to go to the UN and Exxon would have to say to the Enterprise, we have two sites they want to drill; we believe there’s this amount of oil and here’s all of the research on it. The Enterprise says, okay, let us look into it. They come back, come back, Exxon. They come back to the Enterprise which is a UN organization and the Enterprise says, great, you know what? You can have Site A, we’re going to take Site B and here’s the added extra bonus for you, Exxon. “You have to drill our site for us using your money, your equipment and everything else and we get everything that you take out.”

Yeah, exactly.And any dispute involving, let’s say the United States and Cuba or the United States and China go to this new court system they are setting up for the Law of the Sea Treaty and there’s going to be, I think 22, 22 magistrates on it. We have no guarantee that we’ll even get one of those magistrates.

Now, in a dispute between the United States and Cuba or the U.S. and China, who do you think the guys from Uganda and Yemen are going to side with?

This is the way they take our wealth from us.

Any ships that go across, they can levy fines, fees, taxes. If you want to go ahead and fly in the air above water, they can assign taxes, fees, and fines. This is the first ever door that opens our Constitution up for the UN to walk right in and tax the American people.

You bet. Well, and this was written with keeping nuclear submarines out of the water in mind. This was written with the intent that the oceans would only be used for peaceful purposes.

You could never use these for war. So, you know, being a war machine, a nuclear sub can be kept out of the water and the military says, oh, they won’t enforce that. Uh-huh, we’re talking about the UN.

Of course they will. Of course they will.

You don’t think Russia and China — listen, I’m telling you. Teach your kids how to speak Chinese because they are going to rule the world within 50 years.

Sooner than that.

Well, if we don’t wake up, it will be in the next five years, for the love of Pete. It is amazing to me how few people — you know, I think one of the problems is — and help me out on this, Maybe I’m giving them too much of a bone. I’ve talked to senators and they are like, yeah, well, I’m not really sure because the language has really kind of changed. This is something that a lot of senators are just kind of like going, well, I think it’s okay, and I’ve got the word from so- and-so and I’m — in fact, let me give you this. This came in from a listener. They sent it to me. They wrote to Bob Casey, their senator, and they said, do not sign the Law of the Sea Treaty. He said, thanks for taking the time to contact me regarding the United Nations convention on the Law of the Sea. I appreciate hearing from all Pennsylvanians about matters of interest to them. He goes into how it started an everything else. Some of my constituents have reservations about the United States ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty and I take those concerns seriously. As a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, I pledge to study this issue carefully and listen to my colleagues and legal experts before voting to send the treaty to the full Senate for consideration.

Excuse me? How about listening to your constituents, Senator?

Yeah. Do all U.S. senators have the same person writing their responses to their constituents? Because that sounds a lot like Kay Bailey Hutchison’s responses to hers. It’s ridiculous! When in doubt, vote it out, especially where the UN is concerned.

When in doubt, how can you possibly be in doubt? How can you be in doubt?

But if you think the language has changed or if you’ve heard maybe it’s changed, vote against it! If there’s any doubt where the UN is concerned — and there isn’t, you’re right. But if you think there is, you vote against it.

That’s just good, decent American constitutional thinking right there.

Especially when it’s a treaty.

It becomes the — most people don’t understand that. It is — it fuses with the Constitution.

That’s right.

I mean, you don’t go backwards. You know, prohibition, it’s a good idea. Oh, wow, that was a bad idea; we should get out of it. Once a treaty is ratified and signed, it fuses with the Constitution. It’s really —

People might think, we’re the UN already, what’s the big deal. In this Law of the Sea Treaty, we’re only one of 140 countries and unlike other UN issues, there’s no security council here. We don’t have any permanent status, any veto power at all. It’s us against 140. How many of those 140 are our friends? Maybe Britain? Maybe Israel? The rest are going to be against us?

Let me just leave it with what Ronald Reagan believed, and he believed this is the first step into one world government. This is it. This is it. And you know what? They tried to get it through over and over and over again and they keep trying to change the language to make it good. It’s not good. Get out. Do not sign the Law of the Sea Treaty.